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Holly Fisher

Out Of The Blue

Film expérimental | mp4 | couleur et n&b | 90:0 | USA | 2021

"Out Of The Blue" is a living diary and structural breakthrough in the New York filmmaker's quest for a visual language equal in both thought and expression. Mischievously yet rigorously edited text and images, both Fisher's own plus "borrowed" materials, are laced within infinite blue sky images filmed from the airplane window as the filmmaker travels from Berlin to JFK Airport in NYC. Her passage home links timetravel with mind-journey. Multiple storylines play within conflicting time zones. Memories are juxtaposed with historic disasters (especially the bombing of Hiroshima, and the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center) or personal feelings - especially sorrow, since OUT OF THE BLUE took shape within the Coronavirus pandemic lockdown. Featured music is Lois V Vierk's "Words Fail Me", in its entirety, a work inspired by Vierk's eye witness of the World Trade Center towers crashing down, twenty years ago on 9/11.

Holly Fisher received a B.A. in Asian Art History at Columbia University in 1964, and a M.A. in Cinema Studies at New York University in 1982. She lives and works in Tribeca, New York City. Holly Fisher has been active since the mid-sixties as an independent filmmaker, printmaker, teacher, and film editor. She was the editor of Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña’s feature documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin?. This film about a racially motivated Detroit murder case of 1982 was nominated for an Oscar in 1989. Her experimental short works and long-form essay films –– explorations in time, memory, trauma, and perception –– have been screened in museums and film festivals worldwide including Whitney Museum Biennials; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Film Forum, Japan; and two world premieres in The Forum of the Berlinale, Germany. She has received multiple grants from The Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, CAPS, and The American Film Institute, among others. Her silent film Rushlight won the Grand Prize in the 1985 Black Maria Film Festival, and her feature Bullets for Breakfast received “Best Experimental Film Award” at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1992. Her solo retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art (1995) and more recently Anthology Film Archives (2019), were both entitled THE FILMS OF HOLLY FISHER. Fisher completed two new works during the past year of Coronavirus Lockdown, one long-form and one short; Softshoe for Bartok (23 minutes) will be premiered at The Brooklyn Film Festival held in early June 2021; her two feature works Out of the Blue (2021) and Deafening Silence (2012) concerning Burma under dictatorship, will be available for free streaming by Anthology Film Archives, June 16 - 29, 2021. The AFA will also sponsor multiple in-house screenings of Out of the Blue and her feature documentary A Question of Sunlight over the weekend of 9/11. This event has added intrigue since the two films variously frame the creative response of each of us involved –– New York avant-garde composer for both works Lois V Vierk; NY Downtown artist/protagonist José Urbach featured in A Question of Sunlight; and filmmaker Holly Fisher –– because each of us witnessed first hand from our own windows, the attack on the World Trade Towers twenty years ago, Sept 11, 2001.